Limitations

by Scott Turow

  Shoot and drive, he thinks. That’s the plan. Kill him and escape. He had it wrong. All wrong.

  “Puto,” the boy says, “you ask Jesus tonight, man, why it wasn’t shovel time for you. I should have lit you up, man, pulling that lame stuff. Ought to make you kiss this cuete,” he says, showing him the automatic.

  It takes George a second to absorb these words, and even longer to comprehend the implications. And then he sees: They are not going to kill him. They never meant to kill him. This is a robbery, not a murder. They are here to jack him and his car.

  For whatever reason, the boy is still staring, as if he expects George to explain, or even offer a word of thanks. And somehow he agrees.

  “I thought you were someone else,” he tells the boy. They are both astonished by that—George that he has spoken and the kid by what the older man has said. The kid’s dark, quick eyes move around in bewilderment.

  “Man,” he declares, and with that stomps on the accelerator. The Lexus, George’s private refuge, flies around a turn and out of sight.

  He looks for something to sit on, but the closest thing is one of the concrete pillars, and he leans against it, waiting for the feeling to come back into his body. For a moment, he does nothing but breathe, each inhalation a supreme experience. In relief, he is weakening. His legs are overcooked, and slowly he lets his weight go and sags with his back against the pillar down to the filthy, oil-stained floor. He tries to review the entire incident, but there is only one lasting impression. He was wrong. Everything he thought was wrong. He has always believed he understood crime, the causes, the preparation, and the aftermath. But it turns out that, in thirty years, he has apparently learned nothing of any real use. Or accuracy. He misapprehended everything, resisted unnecessarily, and by so doing brought himself into the only mortal peril he actually faced.

  Slowly his spirit seems to be creeping back into his body from the site nearby where it had been watching, preparing for his demise. Every physical possession is gone. He handed over not only his wallet but his house keys, even his reading glasses and his loose change. He does not have Patrice’s cell phone but can’t recall giving that to the boy and wonders if he may have left it in his chambers.

  He never really understood, he thinks. He never fully comprehended. That in the end, or at the start, a human being is only this: a single humiliated fiber that wants desperately to live. He considers the messages he has been receiving and the foolhardy bravery he has tried to display. All pointless. At the moment of consequence, nothing matters but staying alive.

  Patrice could have told him that. It was what she must have experienced when the doctor prodded beneath her larynx and said he didn’t care for what he felt. And so George Mason sits there on the gritty floor, thinking with regret and admiration about his wife.

  15

  SURVIVING

  GETTING BACK INTO the courthouse seems to take forever. He bangs on the glass of the front door with his one good hand for at least five minutes, and when the night security officer, another useless member of Marina’s khaki tribe, finally ambles to the window, he winds his head like something on a spring.

  “Court’s closed,” the khaki officer mouths before turning his back. He probably takes George for a lawyer who missed the filing deadline on an appellate brief he hopes to slip through the mail slot of the clerk’s office.

  “I’m a judge!” George keeps screaming. “I’ve been assaulted.” Eventually, Joanna Dozier, a deputy P.A. who is working late, recognizes him, and the police, at last, are summoned.

  Awaiting the cops, George goes up to his chambers. He removes an ice tray from the freezer compartment in the tiny refrigerator in the corner and applies it to his shirtsleeve. The pain in his forearm is drilling, too deep and distinct, he suspects, for a mere bruise.

  Patrice’s cell phone is on his desk. Since Marina returned it to him on Friday, he has forgotten it more than once, clearly loath at some level to give #1 another chance to scare him. But he uses it to call a twenty-four-hour locksmith. Still recovering in the garage, George was hatcheted by a new fear. He had surrendered his house keys, and his address is on the driver’s license in the wallet he handed over. When the khaki radioed the police, George asked, first thing, that they send a squad to watch his house.

  He phones Patrice next to tell her the locksmith is on the way.

  “I got carjacked and lost the keys.”

  “Oh my God, George. Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay. It’s my own fault. I’ve been warned a dozen times about hanging around in the parking garage. I saw those kids lurking, and I was trying to be a tough guy—” He stops, recognizing that he’s about to reveal much of what he has been holding back. Instead, he asks Patrice to take a look out the front window. The black-and-white is at the curb.

  “But how are you?” she asks again when she’s come back to the phone.

  “Fine, fine. Shaken, naturally. I got a little frisky. I need to get an X-ray of my arm. Right now I’m waiting for the cops.”

  “An X-ray? I’m coming down there,” she says.

  The last thing she needs is more time at a hospital. And her return to work is certain to have worn her out. But the locksmith is reason enough that she shouldn’t leave the house, and she finally accepts that.

  “Between the police and the ER, I’ll be hours,” he says. He promises to wake her when he gets in.

  Abel is peering in by the time he’s off the phone.

  “Jeez-o-Pete, Judge.” He was paged at home and came running in green Bermuda shorts that reveal a pair of pink toothpick legs. It’s a wonder of nature they can support his bulk.

  “It’s all on me, Abel. I should have listened to you.”

  Abel insists on seeing the judge’s arm. For whatever reason, George has not actually looked, and he knows he’s in trouble when the arm proves to be too swollen for him simply to roll up his sleeve. Instead, he has to unbutton his shirt. An alarming dome of sore-looking red-and-blue flesh has risen halfway between his wrist and elbow. Abel whistles at the sight.

  “Judge, let’s get you over to the hospital. The boys from Area 2 can just as well take the report there.”

  In the ER at Masonic, George waits in a little curtained area for more than an hour before they get him to X-ray. The judge took the precaution of bringing some work, but his right arm hurts when he attempts to write, and his editing is confined to juvenile scratches in the margin whose meaning he hopes he will remember tomorrow.

  “Hairline fracture,” the ER doc says when he finally breezes in with the film. He gives George a blue canvas sling and Vicodin for the nights. Otherwise, the judge should be able to get by with an ibuprofen. “See an orthopedist in three days,” the doc says when he sweeps back the curtain.

  Out in the waiting room, Abel has inserted himself into one of the wooden armchairs. He’s passing the time beside a man whom he introduces as a detective from Area 2. His name is Phil Cobberly, a heavy guy with tousled brown hair and a ruddy, alcoholic complexion. George shakes backhanded, using his left.

  “You know, Judge, you and I did some business before,” says Cobberly. “You had me on the stand in that Domingo case years ago. Remember? General Manager of one of these giant furniture outfits, jiggering the inventory and sending merchandise out the back door? Guy was making a bill and a half, and stealing anyway. I thought we had this character on the express to the slam. Six coppers on the surveillance?”

  George recalls now. Cobberly testified at the preliminary hearing and, relying on the joint report the officers had filed, identified the position of every member of the major theft unit as they observed the crime. When George subpoenaed personnel records from McGrath Hall, it turned out that two of those officers had been on leave that night. It was sloppiness, not perjury, but with proof that the police had been willing to swear to more than they actually remembered, the P.A. pled the case for probation while the coppers seethed.

  “Course these little hair b
alls that done you,” Cobberly says, “they won’t have that kinda lawyer, right? Your clients paid the freight. These mutts’ll stay put.” Cobberly smiles and scratches his face. For him there’s divine justice in seeing a guy who made good money freeing bad guys now on the receiving end of crime. George gave up trying to explain things to cops like this a long time ago.

  Abel intervenes. “Judge is probably tired, Philly.”

  Having vented, Cobberly is amiable enough taking the report.

  “What about the tats?” he asks eventually.

  George says the only tattoo he saw was the five-pointed star of the Almighty Latin Nation on the boy’s right hand.

  “If he’s courted in to Latinos Reyes,” Cobberly says, speaking of the set that Corazón probably still heads, “then he should have had a crown right above that, same size.”

  “Maybe that’s what he was looking for with this bit,” Abel says, “kid that age. Blood for life,” he adds. George thought the same thing himself when he believed he was going to get killed, but Abel’s interpretation strikes him as a stretch given how things turned out. The gang initiations usually require violence—shooting, stabbing, stomping rivals—not stealing a Lexus.

  “To me, it was a straight carjack, guys,” George says. “Whatever I thought at first.”

  Neither Cobberly nor Abel are fully convinced, nor is Marina, who comes rushing in just as George and Abel are ready to depart. She too is in shorts, and a placket shirt, both designer items. Off the job, she looks quite stylish. She was on her way downstate for a morning conference when she received the page. By now, George is drained and sick of the hospital—the misery on wheels, the hubbub and brightness—but because Marina has driven 110 miles in two hours to get back, he’s obliged to replay the whole incident, and they sit down together again in the waiting room outside the ER.

  “I don’t buy it as a coincidence, Judge. Look at the pattern. Corazón just keeps ramping it up one notch each time. Getting closer and closer. You say these kids have been watching you for close to a week, right? Like they were waiting for you?”

  “I’d say they were waiting for anybody with a car key. I’m just the guy who got bingo, because I’m always stupid enough to sit around there. If Corazón meant to put me down, he’d never have had a clearer shot.”

  “He’s got his own timetable, Judge. He sent those kids to do just what they did—jack you and scare all of us silly in the process.”

  George understands her theory. Corazón wants everybody—the cops, the prosecutors, and the judge most of all—to know the kill is coming. When it does, every soul who had a hand in putting Corazón away will reside in terror, seeing that the Inca of Los Latinos Reyes takes vengeance with impunity—and a smile, because the state itself will provide Corazón with a complete defense, given all its ironclad guarantees about the total isolation of prisoners in the supermax.

  Call it denial, but George still thinks this is police hype. Latinos Reyes are a street gang, not Mossad, and Corazón’s hallmark is brutality, not calculating patience. But George isn’t going to duke it out with Marina again.

  When he stands to leave, she says, “It’s 24/7 now, Judge. There’ll be cops covering you whenever you leave the courthouse, and my people will have you there. No back talk.”

  He thinks it over. For the time being, this incident will serve as his explanation to Patrice.

  * * *

  His wife is sitting at the slate-topped kitchen island when George comes in, and he can tell something is wrong. She has dug out the bottle of Chivas they keep for guests, and there’s a finger of brown liquid in her glass. Two decades ago, George decided that he needed to set some limits, and neither Patrice nor he usually drinks at home. But it’s the merciless look she settles on him as he enters from the garage that’s most telling.

  “Death threats?” she asks then. “You’ve been getting death threats for weeks and never told me?”

  The news has been on TV. ‘A judge who has been receiving menacing e-mails for several weeks was attacked tonight in the courthouse parking garage but reportedly escaped with only minor injuries.’ The phone has not stopped ringing—concerned friends and several reporters who somehow got the number and want a comment.

  Caught out, George’s first response is, “How did it get on TV?” But by now the cops know everything, and there is no such thing as a secret in McGrath Hall. Marina too might have spoken on background, knowing what the headline will be worth with the County Board.

  “Do I really need to explain this?” he asks Patrice.

  “Yes, you really need to explain this.”

  “I thought we were dealing with enough death threats in this house.”

  “Oh, George.” She takes his good hand and blessedly lingers close, wraps herself around him. “No wonder you’ve been so loony.” A marriage marches through so many stages of intimacy. The first, when you are convinced that the outer shells will melt away and make you one, is the most exalted, celebrated, and dramatic. But like a good lawyer, George can argue in behalf of others—the early moments of parenthood, when you try to figure out how to survive nature’s slyest trick, using love to produce someone to come between you. Or this one. In sickness and in health.

  “Is this why you were talking about not running?” she asks.

  “Not really. Not for the most part.”

  “Well, what’s ‘the most part’? And please don’t say me.”

  He tells her about Warnovits and Lolly Viccino. She listens to the whole story without letting go of his hand.

  “You’ve been having a rough time, mate, haven’t you?” She puts an arm around him again. “George,” she says. “You are a good man. A very good man. It was another era. Things like that— It was vulgar, George. It was disgusting. But it wasn’t criminal. Not then. Times change. Things get better. Humanity improves. And you get better with it. With the help of other human beings. That’s what law’s about. I don’t have to give you that speech. You’ve been giving it to me for thirty years.”

  “And you haven’t believed a word,” he says, smiling.

  She takes a second to consider.

  “Well,” she says, “at least I was listening.”

  They are still sitting together, talking about the effects of fear, what it takes from life and, oddly, adds, when he hears her cell phone buzz in the pocket of his jacket, which is hanging from his chair. He tells himself not to look, but Patrice stands to get the phone for him, and he reaches back rather than let her be the first to see the text message.

  The screen says, “Next time 4 real. C U.”

  16

  THE PUBLIC EYE

  WHEN GEORGE WAKES UP at 6:30 he can hear voices outside, and he cracks one panel on the bedroom shutters. Behind the black-and-white, which has been positioned at the curb all night, three TV vans have parked. Their long portable antennas, looking like giant kitchen whisks, have been raised for broadcast. Awaiting George’s appearance, the crew members from the competing stations are lounging together against one of the vans, drinking their coffee and shooting the breeze with the two cops who are out there to guard the judge.

  “Mate,” he tells Patrice, “you aren’t going to like this.”

  Marina arrives in a courthouse van an hour later. Three more cruisers have shown up as well. George calls Marina’s cell to invite her into the house rather than appear outside and reward the camera crews for lying in wait.

  “Shit,” she says succinctly when he shows her the text message. “We gotta give this phone to the Bureau. See if they can set up some kind of trap. I can’t believe he had the balls to do this again.”

  #1 clearly knows what Marina explained the other day about the difficulty of tracing text messages. And therefore did not care who had the cell phone now, law enforcement or George. He’d get the message either way.

  “Maybe you should think about staying here, Judge.”

  “Good luck talking sense to him,” Patrice says.

  But
George knows he’s being prudent. Today every local security resource will be dedicated to his protection. He’ll be safer than the President. And it would send the wrong message to stay home and cower. He took this job recognizing that the responsibilities are often symbolic.

  Patrice continues peeking through the curtains to inspect the growing crowd on the parkway. There are at least a dozen journalists now, as well as eight cops and, naturally, quite a few of their neighbors. Patrice is having fits about the fate of everything she labored to plant this spring, an act of love and dedication that required energy she didn’t really have so soon after surgery.

  At 8:30, George opens his front door, feeling for all the world like he is entering a stage set. His arm remains too sore for any thought of abandoning the sling, and so his coat is draped across his right shoulder in the fashion of somebody who got winged in a western. Eyes forward, he endeavors to appear pleasant but businesslike and speaks not a word as the camerafolk and reporters dash beside him along his front walk.

  Looking more officious than a general, Marina marches a step ahead of him while Abel alights to sweep open the van door. On George’s behalf, Marina recites a one-line statement George and she composed inside—‘The judge is feeling well and looks forward to conducting the business of the court’—while the cameramen jostle one another for the chance to poke their huge black lenses through the open window on the driver’s side of the van. Screwing up his courage, George glances back to the line of little white sweet alyssum that have been trampled along the edging of the walk.

  The vehicles take off in a convoy, one cruiser in front of Marina’s van and another behind, while the TV trucks zoom up and drop back for camera angles. He considers how this is going to play on the news and laughs.